A generous donation from Professor Paul Murdin has allowed the Institute of Astronomy to establish an annual Murdin Prize for the best published journal paper produced by a current Ph.D. student.

Students who are within three years of the start of their Ph.D. are eligible for the prize.  A committee, normally including Professor Murdin himself, assesses submissions and results are usually announced in July.

 

2018 - Jointly awarded to:

Nicholas Henden - "The FABLE simulations: A Feedback Model for Galaxies, Groups and Clusters"

Peter Kosec - "Evidence for a Variable Ultrafast Outflow in the Newly Discovered Ultraluminous Pulsar NGC 300 ULX-1"

GyuChul Myeong - "Discovery of New Retrograde Substructures: the Shards of w Centauri?"

 

Previous Prizewinners

2017 - Jointly awarded to:

​Adam Jermyn ​- "Tidal heating and stellar irradiation of Hot Jupiters"

Ryan MacDonald ​- "HD 209458b in New Light: Evidence of Nitrogen Chemistry, Patchy Clouds and Sub-Solar Water"

​Bjoern Soergel - "Detection of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with DES Year 1 and SPT"

2016 – Jointly awarded to:

Sebastian Marino – “Exocometary gas in the HD 181327 debris ring”

Gabriel Torrealba – “The feeble giant. Discovery of a large and diffuse Milky Way dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Crater''

2015 – Luca Matra - "CO mass upper limits in the Fomalhaut ring - the importance of NLTE excitation in debris discs and future prospects with ALMA" MNRAS 447, 39363947 (2015).

2014 – Jointly awarded to:

Thomas Collett - “Cosmological Constraints from the double source plane lens SDSSJ0946+1006” arXiv:1403.5278

Tiago Costa - “The environment of bright QSOs at z ˜ 6: star-forming galaxies and X-ray emission. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 439, Issue 2, p.2146-2174.

2013 – Erin Kara - The Closest Look at 1H0707-495: X-ray Reverberation Lags with 1.3 Ms of Data

2012 – Alis Deason - "The Milky Way stellar halo out to 40 kpc: Squashed, broken but smooth"